Ed Tech Tips with E. Mosier

Every summer, there are quite a few tech companies who release updates at the annual ISTE Conference, held in various cities throughout the United States. Lsat summer it was Denver, this summer it will be San Antonio. But, one of the major conferences that's known for showcasing updates is BETT, which takes place each January in London. Google, most notably, has once again released a variety of updates that are exciting for teachers using technology in the classrooms. As expected, there are a multitude of announcements that revolve around AI, but the following announcements are easily going to have a positive impact and increase efficiency in the classroom.

While this isn't necessarily a ground-breaking update since it officially released back in December, Google has updated the way we distribute our Google Forms. This was covered at the end of last week's Ed Tech Tips, but you now have complete control over who is able to respond to your Google Form. Any new Google Form that is created will have a "Publish" icon in the upper right-hand corner. Similar to the way we Share documents, the settings of who has the ability to edit to form and respond to the form can now be customized and can be two different domains.

Google Classroom Guardian is also going to see a slight tweak soon. There will soon be the option to allow Guardians to see a view only look at the Classwork page in Classroom from the summaries. This small change allows parents/guardians to "join" the classroom without ever actually joining, which is a welcome change, since the summaries didn't always provide the best description for parents. Another awesome update is the ability to "grade all" instead of grading each assignment one by one.

Additionally, in Classroom, you will be able to compose student groups within your class. This new feature will allow you to carefully place students in smaller chunks for differentiated instruction and assignment distribution. This will allow you, as the teacher, to focus on a certain group of students within classroom to provide additional resources to or simply assign an extension activity. This will especially be helpful when there are group projects assigned and resource sharing will be easier than ever. While you are currently able to click the checkboxes of individual students, this update will allow you to already have them grouped and click one check box for the entire group to share items with.

However, the previous updates were great, but the biggest and best update to come from BETT is that of Google Class Tools. For as long as they've been in Classrooms, teachers have desired a way to increase classroom management and view what their students are doing on their devices. Advertised as a replacement for programs like LanSchool and GoGuardian, Class Tools will be a feature already on student devices and will allow the teacher to have an incredible amount of control over what their students are doing on them during class! This long-awaited rollout is said to begin appearing on devices in the next few months.

Many of the same features that exist in current monitoring programs will be available in Class Tools. But, there are several others that are worth noting that will be wonderful additions for teachers:

Sessions: Teachers will have the ability to schedule how long their session/class is for. So, no more forgetting to dismiss a class when it's over!

Push Content: Teachers will be able to push content directly from their device to the student devices within Class Tools. This can be YouTube videos, Google files, and even tabs from the teacher's device.

Lock the Content: Once pushed, teachers can "lock content to student devices." Similar to locked mode on Google Forms, this will prohibit students from going to other sites while locked into the teacher's content.

Screen Sharing: With Class Tools, teachers can view a student's screen remotely or they can project a student's screen, straight from the Class Tools window.

Hand Raising: Another cool feature is that students can raise their hand for help digitally within the program. This will be a nice feature to minimize disruptions when students simply ask questions.

While these are just a short sampling of the neat updates that were announced of what's to come, check out the Google blog post summary of the rest of them. As mentioned, there are a lot of them that focus on AI and Google Gemini, there are some that are worth noting in addition to what was described in these short paragraphs.

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Email: mosiere@davenportschools.org
Website: sudlow.davenportschools.org
Location: Sudlow Intermediate School, East Locust Street, Davenport, IA, United States
Phone: 563-445-5150
Twitter/X: @emosier3